The term ‘agenda’ usually refers to a list of meeting activities in the order in which they are taken up in the course of a meeting. In the context of a presentation, e.g. a PowerPoint presentation, the term agenda refers to one or more visual document elements of the presentation, the elements illustrating the structure of the talk. An agenda displays the subjects discussed in a talk, in the following referred to as topics.
The table of contents of a book written with the help of an electronic text processing program, e.g. Microsoft Word, shares some aspects with an agenda of a presentation. The table of contents of a text document usually includes chapter headers or other first-level headers and may include also second-level or even third-level headers depending on the length of the work. The table of contents of a book as well as an agenda of a presentation fulfill the purpose of giving the reader or auditor an overview of the main topics to be mentioned in a book or a presentation. The table of contents of a text document can therefore be regarded as one particular embodiment of an agenda. The table of contents of a book as well as an agenda of a presentation depict the basic structure of a text or a presentation. In presentations, however, the use of multiple agendas is common: at the beginning of each new topic in the talk, a complete agenda is shown displaying the current topic in a way attracting the attention of the audience.
The term ‘current topic’ denotes the topic the speaker will discuss in the next slide or slides of a presentation. For books, said term refers to the topic to be discussed in the current book chapter. All topics already discussed and the topics still to be discussed in the following chapters may be displayed in the agendas in addition to their ‘current topics’. However, those topics are usually formatted differently than the ‘current topic’.
The purpose of using one agenda per topic is to provide the audience with additional information on the structure of the presentation. A reader of a book has the option to have a look at the table of contents whenever he has lost the thread, but the audience of a presentation does not have this option. Ideally, the audience is provided with the information what topic is talked about at the moment (the current topic), but also, which topics have already been discussed and which topics are still to be discussed in the remaining part of the talk.
Microsoft PowerPoint has become the de-facto standard for the generation of presentations while Microsoft Word and various LaTeX derivatives are commonly used for the processing of text documents. Said presentation and text processing programs are ubiquitously used in a multitude of business fields. Despite their ubiquitous usage, said programs show considerable limitations regarding their applicability for creating and editing the table of contents and, in particular, agendas, efficiently.
Technologies being able to speed up the process of drafting presentations and creating text documents are urgently required, as the application of those technologies helps to save valuable working time.
LaTeX derivatives require multiple processing steps (edit, compile, view) in order to propagate changes introduced in the header of a chapter to the table of contents of the document. Microsoft Word is capable of executing this propagation and of updating the table of contents after an explicit request of the user. The propagation of changes introduced to the table of contents to the chapter headers within the text document is not possible at all, neither in LaTeX nor in Microsoft Word. The current document processing programs therefore lack a convenient way to edit a header of a chapter either in the header line or in the table of contents. Currently, in order to edit a particular header, the user has to scroll to the respective header line, edit the header and submit an update or recompilation request in order to update the table of contents. These additional steps require a considerable amount of time and effort.
In Microsoft PowerPoint, the automated generation of overviews or agendas is not possible at all, although agendas are of particular importance for presentations as they serve as guidelines for the audience during the talk.
Currently, agendas are created and synchronized in PowerPoint and other presentation programs manually by the user, an approach that is highly inefficient, error prone and time consuming. Whenever one topic of an agenda has to be changed, e.g. after the detection of a typing error, the changes have to be introduced to all other agendas within a presentation by browsing to all slides containing an agenda and introducing the changes again. If some topics and their associated slides have been reordered within the presentation, currently these changes also have to be manually introduced in all agendas. If a presentation contains multiple, complex agendas which are not synchronized automatically, the multitude of manual update steps required will more or less inevitably lead to inconsistencies between different agendas in a presentation.
The Visual Communication Toolkit developed by the Steercom® GmbH facilitates some aspects of agenda creation but still the agendas created with the help of this toolkit lack the feature of an automated propagation of changes introduced by a user. Said toolkit is implemented as a PowerPoint plug-in and provides a dialog window prompting the user to create or edit topics and to order the specified topics according to a topic hierarchy. Upon confirmation by the user, pages corresponding to the created topics are created. In case existing topics were edited, the corresponding pages are updated. The agenda pages created by said toolkit appear to the user as regular PowerPoint slides comprising usual PowerPoint shapes. While the user is further editing the document in PowerPoint, there are many operations that will break the consistency of agenda pages created this way: Pasting, duplicating or removing agenda pages, reordering pages, reordering topics on a page, or changing some topic text. Some of these inconsistencies can be resolved by explicit use of the means provided by said toolkit. However, the toolkit forcibly restores a consistent set of agendas, discarding most of the changes the user has made in PowerPoint. For instance, agenda pages that have been removed are recreated, and agenda pages that have been added are not incorporated into the existing set of agendas.
In summary, the agenda drafting process used in current presentation software is highly inefficient and error prone. The means provided by current text processing programs for synchronizing the headers of a document with its table of contents are also very limited. The described problems are of predominant importance for presentation software, because presentations, other than text documents, often comprise multiple agendas which are particularly difficult to synchronize manually.